Time for another round of Q&A directly from the comments here on the website:

Q. Matt, I’ve been following your site for a while now and have become curious about what your develop preset menu looks like, i.e., how do you manage the thousands of presets you seem to have?

A. Unfortunately I don’t have a very good management scheme. If you saw the video from last week on Managing Presets you saw my Presets panel and you can see I don’t do a good job of managing them. I’m trying to get better and I think the one thing I plan on doing is creating a “Favorites” folder like I showed in the video. I think I’ll probably start to create separate folders for “Special Effects”, “Black and White”, “Edges” etc. so I can tame the list a bit.

Q. When printing to JPEG in the print module, is there a way for the name of the image/file you’re printing to be used in the Save As dialog box? This would save tons of time/typing. Thanks!

A. Nope. You’d think a default of that image name would pop in there automatically but it doesn’t. Great idea though.

Q. Is it possible to create a print (either for printer or JPEG output) that has different images of different sizes?

A. No. You can have different sizes if you create a picture package, but it’s going to be the same image. You can put different images using the contact sheet option but it’s going to force each cell to the same size.

While we’re on this printing topic, I do get questions in this form or another very often. It usually revolves around people wanting to print album pages with specific ideas in mind. Right now, the print module is made primarily for contact sheets, one-photo prints, or picture packages. It’s not a book layout engine and it’s not meant to print album pages or pages that could be used in books (even though we can “force” it to with some creativity). I’m not sure if that’ll change in the future (I hope they’ll add some sort of book module or printing options) but we can always hope. Either way, once you understand that the Print module is not really meant for books and photo albums and complex layouts, I think it helps to come to grips with what you can/can’t do.

Q. Here’s an HDR question. If I select 5 photos and File > Plugin extras > Export to Photomatix Pro, where are the .TIF files being stored at? I can’t find them on my computer anywhere and they have to be here. I want to delete them so as not to clutter my computer.

A. I’ve wondered about the same thing actually. I asked the folks at Photomatix (HDRSoft.com) and they told me the files are created somewhere in temporary storage and are deleted when you’re done processing them into the file image. I have yet to verify this but, from what I’ve seen, they’re a very thorough software developer so I have no doubt that they wouldn’t leave all the high quality TIFFs floating around out there to clutter your computer.

Thanks for all of the questions folks. As always keep ’em coming. Have a great day!

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